Adventures in rooting: Running Jelly Bean on last year’s Kindle Fire

Amazon has left its first tablet behind, so we take matters into our own hands.

If you purchased a Kindle Fire at any point before Amazon refreshed the lineup in September, I've got bad news for you: none of the improvements made to the software used by the 2012 Kindle Fire and the Kindle Fire HD are going to be brought to your tablet. If you have any particular complaints about the way your older Fire works or acts, that's too bad, because it's the end of the line.

Luckily, the Fire's low price and popularity relative to other Android tablets has made it a common target for Android's bustling open-source community, which has automated most of the sometimes-messy process of rooting and flashing your tablet. The Kindle Fire Utility boils the whole rooting process down to a couple of steps, and from there it's pretty easy to find pretty-stable Jelly Bean ROMs. A CyanogenMod-based version is actively maintained, but I prefer the older Hashcode ROM, which is very similar to the interface on the Nexus 7.

If you need extra help, Liliputing has a pretty handy guide to get you through everything—bear in mind, however, the standard warnings about rooting tablets. As we'll soon see, installing different software on your Kindle Fire can greatly increase its speed and utility, but it doesn't come without caveats. If you choose to do this to your older Kindle Fire, know that you're definitely voiding what's left of your warranty, and though I've had no major issues with the tools above, you do run the risk of turning your tablet into a useless brick. Some Android features may work intermittently or not at all, and there may be software bugs that the maintainers of these ROMs never get around to fixing. There are also security concerns, since unlocking your tablet's bootloader can make it that much easier for it to be screwed up by malicious code or, in the case of theft, used to access your personal data.

If you understand and accept the risks, Jelly Bean is in many ways a huge improvement over Amazon's Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich-based software. The increased performance is the most evident gain—gone is the jerky scrolling and slow browsing performance of this and every other Kindle Fire we've seen so far, and in its place is a smooth experience that's not much different from the Nexus 7.

What's it like?

Enlarge/ The Nexus 7 and a rooted Kindle Fire: peas (beans?) in a pod.

Andrew Cunningham

The particular ROM that we used for our testing sticks very close to the stock Android experience, which makes using our rooted Kindle Fire more or less identical to using the Nexus 7. The Fire's lower-resolution 1024x600 screen does make things a bit fuzzier than the 1280x800 screen in the Nexus 7, but it doesn't reduce the number of icons or widgets that will fit on the home screen. As when comparing the Kindle Fire to the Kindle Fire HD, you notice the difference the most while reading text, which benefits the most from higher pixel density.

The tablet's older, weaker hardware relative to the newer Kindle Fires and the Nexus 7 doesn't pose a problem to Jelly Bean, which is just as smooth and consistent on our rooted tablet as it is on other older devices—these are two adjectives that can't be used to describe Amazon's own Android fork, which is infamously jerky and imprecise when scrolling or resizing items. It helps that the particular ROM we're using slightly overclocks the 2011 Fire's processor to the same 1.2GHz used in the 2012 Fire, and that the older tablet's 512MB of RAM has more to do with the number of apps that can be loaded into memory than it does with speed.

The Kindle Fire's 512MB of memory is slight compared to modern Android tablets, which usually include 1GB or 2GB or RAM, but the software is good enough at caching apps that memory usage is rarely a problem.

The presence of the Google Play store gets you far more third-party apps than Amazon's own store (including e-reading apps from direct competitors like Kobo and Barnes & Noble), which is probably the single biggest benefit of rooting your Fire. If you're deeply invested in Amazon's ecosystem, though, you do have to absorb some losses: the Android Kindle app has fewer features and fonts than the native Kindle version, and there isn't yet an app for streaming from the Amazon Instant Video library. If you're looking for a general-purpose tablet, though, Jelly Bean and Google Play are both net improvements.

How much faster is it?

The Silk browser's performance is one of the Fire's biggest disappointments—Amazon claims that its server-side processing capabilities speed up its browser relative to the competition, but our qualitative and quantitative benchmarks have never been able to back up this claim.

Sunspider is one of the few benchmarks we can run in Amazon's Android fork. Upgrading the 2011 Kindle Fire to Jelly Bean and running the benchmark in Google Chrome nets us a score that not only beats both the 2011 and 2012 Fires, but also edges out the Nexus 7. As we saw in our Kindle Fire review, though, Sunspider scores don't have much to do with the amount of time a page actually takes to load. Comparing the rooted Kindle Fire to the 2012 Fire and the Nexus 7 show just how far behind Amazon's browser can lag.

Page

Rooted Kindle Fire (Chrome)

2012 Kindle Fire (Silk)

Nexus 7

arstechnica.com

5.6 seconds

6.8 seconds

5.1 seconds

NYT.com

6.3 seconds

8.6 seconds

6.1 seconds

qwantz.com

2.8 seconds

6.5 seconds

2.4 seconds

In other cases, such as application load times, Amazon's software doesn't actually get in the way, but it still feels like it does. Apps like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Spotify, and various games available on both Google Play and Amazon's app store launched in roughly the same amount of time on both the 2012 Kindle Fire and our rooted Kindle Fire. The problem here lies mostly in perceived speed: in stock Android, tapping an app immediately invokes a reaction. Depending on the app, that reaction could be a fully-loaded program that's ready to use, or a blank screen that stays blank until the app is loaded and ready to use.

In Amazon's software, tapping an application launches it, but there's a delay for most apps—rather than throwing up a blank page while the software loads, the tablet simply sits there until it has something to show you. The absolute time you're waiting is often the same, but the thing about tablets and touch interfaces that Jelly Bean (and iOS) get right is that the appearance of speed and smoothness is at least as important as actual speed and smoothness.

How does it compare to the competition?

Rooting the old Kindle Fire gave us our first chance to compare it directly to the Nexus 7 and other tablets using our standard benchmarks—this will show us how the Kindles' dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4 stacks up to other Android tablets when the playing field is leveled.

Looking at the Geekbench and GLBenchmark scores, the Kindle Fire's CPU performance is pretty impressive for a year-old, dual-core tablet, though its GPU performance is decidedly middle-of-the-road. The Geekbench scores suggest that the OMAP 4 CPU cores are actually more efficient than the NVIDIA Tegra 3 cores in the Nexus 7, though the Nexus 7 will still be faster when all four of its cores are being used.

Conclusions: Amazon can do better

Seeing just how well the 2011 Kindle Fire handles Jelly Bean drives home what we've said in every Kindle Fire review we've done: this software can and should be better than it is. Amazon is in a unique position compared to anyone else using Android: they've got that all-important media ecosystem that Google, Samsung, and others have tried to create, but theirs is actually good. Amazon has a large library of competitively-priced music and video, and they add to that an industry-leading e-bookstore, a competitive cloud storage service, and a video streaming service that is making inroads against the likes of Netflix and Hulu.

On top of this, Amazon has demonstrated an Apple-like ability to generate buzz about and interest in its products—its Kindle Fire events in the last two years have taken at least a couple of pages out of Cupertino's playbook—and having the top spot on the Amazon.com homepage is advertising that most tablet companies would kill for. Its hardware is reasonably attractive and well-specced, and hits a wide variety of price points. Amazon's got just about everything else right, which is at least part of the reason why their jerky, custom software is so off-putting.

It might be that adding Jelly Bean's speed-increasing underpinnings to Amazon's software would improve the situation enough to negate stock Android's performance advantages; Amazon hasn't said whether this is in the works, but the past and current Kindle Fire hardware is good enough that an upgrade is within the realm of possibility. Amazon's services and reach are good enough that the Kindle Fire lineup could provide a better Android experience than Google's own Nexus devices; unfortunately, at this point, the Kindle Fire software is one of the stronger arguments against third-party Android skins.

The Amazon "ecosystem" is hardly a strong enough pull to purchase the Kindle. You can buy their music and books and of course shop on any Android tablet. So all you're really missing out on is Amazon Instant Video. I don't understand why reviewers constantly cite it as a plus for Amazon tablets. Just use Netflix or Google Play. Haven't used Google Play Books, but Google Music is probably the better choice for an Android user anyway. Upload 20,000 songs for free instead of only 5 GB, and an auto-uploader instead of having to use the browser.

The Amazon "ecosystem" is hardly a strong enough pull to purchase the Kindle. You can buy their music and books and of course shop on any Android tablet. So all you're really missing out on is Amazon Instant Video. I don't understand why reviewers constantly cite it as a plus for Amazon tablets. Just use Netflix or Google Play. Haven't used Google Play Books, but Google Music is probably the better choice for an Android user anyway. Upload 20,000 songs for free instead of only 5 GB, and an auto-uploader instead of having to use the browser.

Google Play is beta at best. I buy songs from there but it's not a full featured content ecosystem like Amazon.

I did this a week ago, and yes, it's a big net plus. I certainly wouldn't call it fast, but it's much more usable than the stock software.

Big caveat: At least for me, battery life took a huge hit vs. the stock KF software. I never had to worry about battery life before, now it's barely making it all day with a couple hours of games/movies mixed in. It's workable for my current usage, but the next time I take the kids on a long road trip, it's going to be dead within a few hours.

Why would Amazon possibly care about upgrading your year-old Fire? Amazon is selling a device to lure people into buying Amazon content. The company doesn't care about making it easier or better for you to use a Fire as a general-purpose tablet. Every dollar they spend making it upgradable is a wasted dollar — for their particular business model. They're not going to sell substantially more Fires by making them upgradable, so I don't think there's any chance that it's going to be anything other than what we see now. A Fire is going to basically work the way you bought it unless you make this kind of geeky effort to make it kinda work. If you want to be assured of getting the latest version of an OS, buy an iPad. If you want to at least deal with a company that's going to TRY to upgrade your OS every now and then, buy one of the other Android tablets. But if you buy a Fire, accept that it is what it is. If it suits your needs as you buy it, fine. If not, don't expect it to change.

The Amazon "ecosystem" is hardly a strong enough pull to purchase the Kindle. You can buy their music and books and of course shop on any Android tablet. So all you're really missing out on is Amazon Instant Video. I don't understand why reviewers constantly cite it as a plus for Amazon tablets. Just use Netflix or Google Play. Haven't used Google Play Books, but Google Music is probably the better choice for an Android user anyway. Upload 20,000 songs for free instead of only 5 GB, and an auto-uploader instead of having to use the browser.

Right now, I'm watching Game of Thrones season 1 even though I don't have an HBO subscription. Also, I am working my way through The West Wing for free on Amazon (with a Prime subscription which I already had for shipping Christmas gifts).

The Amazon "ecosystem" is hardly a strong enough pull to purchase the Kindle. You can buy their music and books and of course shop on any Android tablet. So all you're really missing out on is Amazon Instant Video. I don't understand why reviewers constantly cite it as a plus for Amazon tablets. Just use Netflix or Google Play. Haven't used Google Play Books, but Google Music is probably the better choice for an Android user anyway. Upload 20,000 songs for free instead of only 5 GB, and an auto-uploader instead of having to use the browser.

Right now, I'm watching Game of Thrones season 1 even though I don't have an HBO subscription. Also, I am working my way through The West Wing for free on Amazon (with a Prime subscription which I already had for shipping Christmas gifts).

How do I do either of those things with Google Play store or Netflix?

I did mention that Amazon Video is the one thing you can't do on other tablets. Most people say that Netflix has a greater selection than Amazon Video which is why I mentioned it (I don't use either so I can't comment directly). I mentioned Google Play because it's another alternative, even if its video selection isn't as great. Of course you may be able to find some shows or movies that are only available on Amazon Video, but that's probably a small subset. But it is nice to be able to use the Prime subscription that you already had for other purposes.

theJonTech wrote:

atfp wrote:

The Amazon "ecosystem" is hardly a strong enough pull to purchase the Kindle. You can buy their music and books and of course shop on any Android tablet. So all you're really missing out on is Amazon Instant Video. I don't understand why reviewers constantly cite it as a plus for Amazon tablets. Just use Netflix or Google Play. Haven't used Google Play Books, but Google Music is probably the better choice for an Android user anyway. Upload 20,000 songs for free instead of only 5 GB, and an auto-uploader instead of having to use the browser.

Google Play is beta at best. I buy songs from there but it's not a full featured content ecosystem like Amazon.

As I mentioned, the only part of the Amazon ecosystem you can't participate in on other tablets is video. If Amazon has the songs you want, you can buy and listen to them on any Android device. Same for books. So Google Play's selection only factors in for video. Google Music is still valuable for the greater storage capacity.

All I'm saying is using the term "ecosystem" as a draw for the Kindles is a little disingenuous. There is little that separates the Amazon experience on a Kindle from the Amazon experience on other Android tablets except for video.

Honestly, the Amazon ecosystem is the only thing which keeps me from rooting a custom ROM. It's their ploy, and it works on people like me. It's not about their devices. As a Prime member, it just made more sense to get a Fire instead of say a Nook Tablet...which to me had more features and was a better tablet (maybe not $50 more)...which can probably root just as well. So ars, let see the Nook rundown, please.

The Amazon "ecosystem" is hardly a strong enough pull to purchase the Kindle. You can buy their music and books and of course shop on any Android tablet. So all you're really missing out on is Amazon Instant Video. I don't understand why reviewers constantly cite it as a plus for Amazon tablets. Just use Netflix or Google Play. Haven't used Google Play Books, but Google Music is probably the better choice for an Android user anyway. Upload 20,000 songs for free instead of only 5 GB, and an auto-uploader instead of having to use the browser.

Right now, I'm watching Game of Thrones season 1 even though I don't have an HBO subscription. Also, I am working my way through The West Wing for free on Amazon (with a Prime subscription which I already had for shipping Christmas gifts).

How do I do either of those things with Google Play store or Netflix?

I did mention that Amazon Video is the one thing you can't do on other tablets. Most people say that Netflix has a greater selection than Amazon Video which is why I mentioned it (I don't use either so I can't comment directly). I mentioned Google Play because it's another alternative, even if its video selection isn't as great. Of course you may be able to find some shows or movies that are only available on Amazon Video, but that's probably a small subset. But it is nice to be able to use the Prime subscription that you already had for other purposes.

The "Netflix selection is better than Amazon" line is at best out-of-date, particularly since Epix dumped Netflix and put all their content on Amazon. As a subscriber to both, I have seen Netflix (and Hulu for that matter) start to die a noticeable slow death.

Honestly, the Amazon ecosystem is the only thing which keeps me from rooting a custom ROM. It's their ploy, and it works on people like me. It's not about their devices. As a Prime member, it just made more sense to get a Fire instead of say a Nook Tablet...which to me had more features and was a better tablet (maybe not $50 more)...which can probably root just as well. So ars, let see the Nook rundown, please.

We reviewed the Nook tablet when it came out last year, and we'll be looking at the new Nook HD lineup as soon as they're available.

If Apple pulled this crap, cynically end-of-lifing products after one year, you guys would scream bloody murder. This makes me very happy to be an Apple user.

It's crazy. When Amazon announced the new tablets with a new version of the software, I was amazed that apparently not a single tech "journalist" asked them if the current KF would receive an upgrade.

So I pinged a Verge author and two Ars authors on Twitter. Two responded, and, while unsaid, the vibe I got from both was "Who cares?"

Unbelievable, considering that's one of the questions most people care about when Google or Apple announce an OS upgrade. Google even had to start an apparently useless "Alliance" just to address the issue. And here's Amazon, with ~20% of the tablet market, and nobody in the tech community seems to care. I can only assume it's because none of them bought one.

I appreciate Andrew taking the time to actually do a bit of reporting on the options for this significant group of users.

Why would Amazon possibly care about upgrading your year-old Fire? Amazon is selling a device to lure people into buying Amazon content.

Exactly why they would want to keep people as satisfied with their current hardware as possible. They don't want to sell you more hardware, they lose money on that. (supposedly) They want to sell you more Amazon content.

They actually have more reason to upgrade devices than most Google OEMs and Apple.

The CM builds are actually pretty good, I run a CM9 in my phone and a CM9 in dual boot mode with my HP touchpad. The only issues I had with rooting my touchpad continues to be the wifi - it's a bit spotty and tends to drop connections - something my phone never experiences.

Tempted to sell off the touchpad and get a Fire after this article - sheesh - they're running pretty darn cheap these days.

Why would Amazon possibly care about upgrading your year-old Fire? Amazon is selling a device to lure people into buying Amazon content.

Exactly why they would want to keep people as satisfied with their current hardware as possible. They don't want to sell you more hardware, they lose money on that. (supposedly) They want to sell you more Amazon content.

They actually have more reason to upgrade devices than most Google OEMs and Apple.

No, they really don't have a reason to upgrade it. If people are willing to buy content with a Fire on Day 1 or Day 100, there's no reason that experience should be any different on Day 400 or Day 500 (or whatever). If you're happy with the initial experience, you're going to be happy with the identical experience a year or two later, as long as the device keeps working. That's the theory. I'd be shocked if Amazon ever got involved in serious upgrades to existing hardware.

I've been running a rooted, custom version of the stock (GB) os on my Nook Tab for close to a year, since B&N rolled out an "update" to kill off sideloading of non-B&N apps (which is why I chose the NT over the KF in the first place, d*mmit.) We are just now starting to see mostly-stable ICS and JB roms show up for the Nook from devs at XDA, etc.. I'm still steamed at B&N's bait-and-switch, and feel for the poor schmoes that are going to get suckered in by the HDMI and 4.0 os on the new Nooks. Andrew, if you could spotlight the state of things in ours, the OTHER non-tablet tablet owners' camp, I would be most grateful.

Why would Amazon possibly care about upgrading your year-old Fire? Amazon is selling a device to lure people into buying Amazon content.

Exactly why they would want to keep people as satisfied with their current hardware as possible. They don't want to sell you more hardware, they lose money on that. (supposedly) They want to sell you more Amazon content.

They actually have more reason to upgrade devices than most Google OEMs and Apple.

No, they really don't have a reason to upgrade it. If people are willing to buy content with a Fire on Day 1 or Day 100, there's no reason that experience should be any different on Day 400 or Day 500 (or whatever). If you're happy with the initial experience, you're going to be happy with the identical experience a year or two later, as long as the device keeps working. That's the theory. I'd be shocked if Amazon ever got involved in serious upgrades to existing hardware.

You're presupposing that people are happy with the current, laggy software, while seeing ads for a sleek Nexus tablet that is much more powerful, or next generation Kindle devices with more features such as the Kids Zone.

Just because they didn't return the device within the 30 day return window doesn't mean they love it, and if they decide buy the Nexus device, or even another loss-led Kindle, it's still bad for Amazon.

Clearly you disagree, and apparently Amazon does as well, but that's my take.

Tried it. Couldn't get the drivers to install. This is my second failed attempt to root my Fire.

The next time some Android fanboy tells me how effortless it is to root a device, I'm going to smack them upside the head. This stuff is not user-friendly.

It works, but the driver installation IS hit or miss. You may have to try it a few times, and manually jack with the driver selection in device manager until the right one appears. No idea why it's so touchy.

1. Ran the rooting app from a windows box after installing the drivers.2. Backed up by rebooting and pressing the power button twice to get to recovery.3. Downloaded the rom direct to sd/downloads4. Wiped device - factory reset from recovery.5. Installed the rom by pointing to the zip from recovery.6. Downloaded gapps.7. Installed gapps by pointing to the zip from recovery.

Honestly, the Amazon ecosystem is the only thing which keeps me from rooting a custom ROM.

Same here. My Wife and I got Kindle Fires as an upgrade to our e-ink Kindles. We use it first and foremost as an ebook reader. The additional web browsing, video playback, and apps are all just a bonus that replaced our aging living room laptop. Losing the Amazon ecosystem is a no-go just because I want to get my geek on.

Amazon is getting these things made, and selling them as a loss-leader in order to sell more content. It doesn't make any sense for them to put money into upgrading something that still does its job as a content delivery device, especially when they lost money selling it in the first place.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.